Asia Institute - Research Publications
Permanent URI for this collection
Search Results
1 - 7 of 7
-
Item
-
ItemJapanese NPOs and the State Re-examined: Reflections Eighteen Years On(Amsterdam University Press, 2020)This volume focuses on the new and diversifying interactions between civil society and the state in contemporary East Asia by including cases of entanglement and contention in the three fully consolidated democracies in the area: Japan, ...
-
ItemShōgai gakushū − lebenslanges Lernen in Japan(Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co, KG, 2020-05-04)
-
ItemNew Frontiers in Japanese Studies(Routledge, 2020-04-02)Over the last 70 years, Japanese Studies scholarship has gone through several dominant paradigms, from ‘demystifying the Japanese’, to analysis of Japanese economic strength, to discussion of global interest in Japanese popular culture. This book assesses this literature, considering future directions for research into the 2020s and beyond. Shifting the geographical emphasis of Japanese Studies away from the West to the Asia-Pacific region, this book identifies topic areas in which research focusing on Japan will play an important role in global debates in the coming years. This includes the evolution of area studies, coping with aging populations, the various patterns of migration and environmental breakdown. With chapters from an international team of contributors, including significant representation from the Asia-Pacific region, this book enacts Yoshio Sugimoto’s notion of ‘cosmopolitan methodology’ to discuss Japan in an interdisciplinary and transnational context and provides overviews of how Japanese Studies is evolving in other Asian countries such as China and Indonesia. New Frontiers in Japanese Studies is a thought-provoking volume and will be of great interest to students and scholars of Japanese and Asian Studies.
-
Item‘Community power’: Renewable energy policy and production in post-Fukushima Japan(Routledge - Taylor & Francis, 2020)Japan has assumed a central position within global discourses on energy since the catastrophic earthquake and tsunami in 2011 that caused radiation leakage from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. This disaster singlehandedly destabilised energy policymaking and production practices in Japan. Before this disaster, many people in Japan, including myself, never gave much thought about energy, and only individuals with some reason to be worried about energy issues engaged in discussion about energy. However, people from a broader cross section of society joined the conversation after the disaster. They started learning about how the electricity system works – how electricity is generated and how it is consumed. Before the 11 March disaster, if and when the general public discussed electricity, it was mostly within the context of global climate change; in other words, how to reduce carbon emissions. Unlike coal and natural gas plants, nuclear energy does not involve carbon emissions during the generation of electricity. Such energy generation reflected an ideal pursuit of development and growth, which dominated our lifestyle over the post-Second World War period. However, the post-disaster landscape reshaped our values and ways of living at the grassroots level. People began to engage in more insightful political debates.
-
ItemIntroduction: Envisioning new frontiers in Japanese Studies(Routledge - Taylor & Francis, 2020)The introductory chapter clarifies this book’s aims and scope. By ‘new frontiers in Japanese Studies’ we are referring to a shift in geographical emphasis from the United States and the United Kingdom to countries in the Asia-Pacific region through the integration of multiple perspectives on Japanese society from hereto scholarly underrepresented areas. We also envision ‘new frontiers’ as a repositioning of Japanese Studies from ‘outsiders looking in’ to ‘insiders looking out’. Lastly, we perceive a ‘new frontier’ in Japanese Studies as a decisive movement away from the idea that people working in Japanese Studies are primarily presenting case studies while eschewing theoretical contributions to knowledge. Ultimately, this chapter proposes that scholarship should go beyond methodological nationalism – an assumption that the nation-state is the natural and necessary form of society in modernity. To re-conceptualise Japanese Studies, we will open up new horizons by demonstrating how we can make the empirical investigation of border crossings and other transnational phenomena possible. The methodology we employ in this book is in line with Yoshio Sugimoto’s notion of ‘cosmopolitan methodology’ (presented in Rethinking Japanese Studies, Routledge 2018). In so doing, we make Japanese Studies ever more multicultural, multilingual, interdisciplinary and transnational in nature
-
ItemAs If Nothing Had Occurred: Anti-Tokyo Olympics Protests and Concern Over Radiation Exposure(Asia-Pacific Journal, 2020)This paper argues the 2020 Tokyo Olympics has raised people’s awareness of concerns over radiation exposure as a form of social movement. One example is the Shinjuku demonstration, organized by the Network to Evacuate People from Radiation, which constantly advocates for protecting children from continuing radiation exposure. The group raised the issue that Olympic torch would pass through municipalities in Fukushima Prefecture where several high-level radiation hot spots are confirmed. Furthermore, concerns over radiation exposure have been also generating a grassroots movement to create the Chernobyl Law in Japan. This paper documents the emerging movement across the country, led by the Citizens’ Action for Fukushima Justice.